Turning theatre into law, and other spaces of politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We assess Practicing Democracy, a play created by Headlines Theatre in Vancouver, Canada, which was the first attempt to deploy Augusto Boal's legislative theatre in North America. The goal of this project was to use forum theatre to generate creative solutions to the dangers created by provincial government cuts to social welfare, and to work with local government to turn some of these recommendations into new local government laws. This goal was not attained, although the report produced by Headlines Theatre may have supported other local initiatives. We examine the ways in which local politicians and planners maintained the distinction between expert and amateur, so as to undermine the credibility of public input. A bureaucratic process of classification and abstraction also inhibited the recommendations from being turned into law, and reinstated the expertise of politicians and bureaucrats. We balance this assessment with a reading of spaces that are excessive to this rational calculation: the city as a concrete site of embodied, creative spatial disruptions; and theatre as a pedagogical public sphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".